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I'm willing to bet there is a study about the effects of letting people who are elected be involved in the process of re-drawing the districts they are elected

I'm willing to bet there is a study about the effects of letting people who are elected be involved in the process of re-drawing the districts they are elected from.

deadEndDave 7y ago
Gerrymandering is overstated and is held up to be the boogeyman of either party. The reality is much more believable: Political scientists Jowei Chen of the University of Michigan and Jonathan Rodden of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution conducted an in-depth study in 2013 of legislative-district lines, using computer simulations of precinct-by-precinct voting patterns to map alternative redistricting plans without regard to partisanship or race. What they concluded was that Republicans have a natural advantage conferred by the “human geography” of Democratic voters’ concentrating disproportionately in overwhelmingly liberal urban districts while Republican voters are more evenly distributed in the suburban, exurban, small-town, and rural districts. Chen and Rodden found that this “unintentional gerrymandering” produced an average Republican bias of five points nationwide, or seven to eight points in such states as Pennsylvania and Georgia.In Florida, their main test case, they used the 50–50 precinct-by-precinct Bush and Gore votes and found, based on random computer simulations of a map of 25 districts (the number of House districts in the 2002 redistricting), that Republicans had an average of 61 percent of the House seats. As Chen and Rodden explained in early 2014: “In the vast majority of states, our nonpartisan simulations produced Republican seat shares that were not much different from the actual numbers in the last election.” That’s before even considering the impact of the VRA. And while the 241–194 House majority elected in 2016 benefited from a 21-seat advantage (even as House Republicans had 50.6 percent of the two-party national vote), a look at the numbers suggests that most of this advantage was owing to factors other than gerrymandering.
simonh 7y ago
I'm in the UK and frankly the level of gerrymandering in the US is appalling. I mean it's your system, I hesitate to judge generally speaking, but OMG is your system of redistricting screwed up.

I'm willing to bet there is a study about the effects of letting people who are elected be involved in the process of re-drawing the districts they are elected from.

deadEndDave 7y ago

Gerrymandering is overstated and is held up to be the boogeyman of either party. The reality is much more believable: Political scientists Jowei Chen of the University of Michigan and Jonathan Rodden of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution conducted an in-depth study in 2013 of legislative-district lines, using computer simulations of precinct-by-precinct voting patterns to map alternative redistricting plans without regard to partisanship or race. What they concluded was that Republicans have a natural advantage conferred by the “human geography” of Democratic voters’ concentrating disproportionately in overwhelmingly liberal urban districts while Republican voters are more evenly distributed in the suburban, exurban, small-town, and rural districts. Chen and Rodden found that this “unintentional gerrymandering” produced an average Republican bias of five points nationwide, or seven to eight points in such states as Pennsylvania and Georgia.In Florida, their main test case, they used the 50–50 precinct-by-precinct Bush and Gore votes and found, based on random computer simulations of a map of 25 districts (the number of House districts in the 2002 redistricting), that Republicans had an average of 61 percent of the House seats. As Chen and Rodden explained in early 2014: “In the vast majority of states, our nonpartisan simulations produced Republican seat shares that were not much different from the actual numbers in the last election.” That’s before even considering the impact of the VRA. And while the 241–194 House majority elected in 2016 benefited from a 21-seat advantage (even as House Republicans had 50.6 percent of the two-party national vote), a look at the numbers suggests that most of this advantage was owing to factors other than gerrymandering.

simonh 7y ago

I'm in the UK and frankly the level of gerrymandering in the US is appalling. I mean it's your system, I hesitate to judge generally speaking, but OMG is your system of redistricting screwed up.